Christ told a crippled man that his sins had been forgiven. The temple elders grumbled about Jesus’ ability to forgive sins. To show that the “Son of Man” had the power to forgive sins [u:1wwafcnh]on Earth[/u:1wwafcnh], Christ healed the man’s body. John the Baptist said of Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world.”

How can this forgiving and this healing, and John’s declaration that Christ takes away the sins of the world, be effected before Christ’s Passover consecration, and His actual atonement on the cross?

The Lamb of God slain before the beginning of time is an eternal singularity. Christ’s earthly life is the timeless surfacing within time. In the fullness of time, the efficacy of the Lamb of God inaugurates in time, that is, on Earth, a timeless consecration and sacrifice.

Christ affirms that the New Covenant writ in His Blood, that temporal flowering of His everlasting gift as the Lamb of God, is “so that sins may be forgiven.” “Justice and mercy kiss.”

Christ granted Peter and the Apostles all the divine power and authority He received from the Father. Baptism, the first mandate of Christ’s Great Commission, that adoption into the family of the I Am, imparts total forgiveness of sins. Many of old waited to be Baptized on their death bed.

All sacraments impart a grace which remits venial sin, and this grace comes by way of Christ’s New Covenant. Those who are dead in sin may be resurrected within the New Covenant by the successors of those Apostles who were told by Christ, “Whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; whose sins your retain, they are retained.” The ability to grant eternal life flows from the God-Man’s shed Blood, “so that sins may be forgiven.”

Good Catholicity is good physics. It would be well to note that eternality, the fundament of reality, is one of those divine revelations which we take for granted. But that premise of an eternal, let alone of The Eternal, conflicted with the presumed absolutes of time and space, those dual obsessions of the atheistic Enlightenment. The relativity of time and space was confirmed by Albert Einstein. The eternal is still our home, The Eternal our Aba. With matter and energy not able to be destroyed, it is more importantly able to be expressed in the perfection our Creator willed before the Sin of Adam.